Stacy Horn

Today I’m going on a walk about. Well, it may turn out to be the first half of a walk about. I’d planned to walk around to all the animal shelters, but I have to go downtown first to scout out a location for a 9/11 lunch and I may not make it to them all.

The other day I was talking to a friend about the phenomena where you see someone you recognize and you can’t quite place them. Your first thought is that it’s someone you’ve met and you’re forgetting them and then you realize, oh. No, I don’t know them. I saw them on TV.

Yesterday, I saw this person and I almost said hello and then I realized, no, I saw them on TV. Her name is Kara Laricks and she was the winner of a reality tv competition show called Fashion Star.

There were so many amazing outfits, and I didn’t get the best of them for one reason or another; people whipped by too quickly, my jaw was dropping, etc. Some of the best were going in and out of Alexander McQueen’s. Oh, this is not a comment on the outfits of the people in these photographs! And I got free stuff! Two pairs of gloves, a really nice notebook, and Pantene samples.

Anyway, it was fun to walk around. If I wasn’t feeling so weary I would have tried more neighborhoods. But now I’m home, in my pajamas, watching the DNC. Clinton and Sandra Fluke killed it last night (that girl is going places). Kerry was surprisingly good tonight, and Biden is coming up next!

For some reason, over the years my neighborhood has become one of the places for high fashion. So when the fashion industry holds its yearly Fashion’s Night Out, my neighborhood and the Meatpacking District, which is one neighborhood over, becomes one big party.

It’s wall to wall people dressed to the nines, and all the stores that I can’t afford to shop in open their doors and serve drinks, food, there’s music, sometimes fun things to do (besides buying things). Sometimes free stuff. Little things usually, like last year all I got was a bag of potato chips, but they were actually really seriously good chips.

It’s very festive and fun. I just love to walk around taking pictures. (Looking dowdy in comparison to all the people descending on my neighborhood.) There’s this energy that just feels so completely frivolous, but in a good way, a sparkly, bubbly, effervescent party way. At some point I know I’ll be thinking that as fun as this is, the world would be so much better if Buddy was still in it, but what are you going to do? Eventually I’ll stop thinking things like that.

A pigeon who has been hanging around on my fire escape.

I dragged myself out of the apartment to run errands and was rewarded by coming upon a shoot for the HBO show Girls. This is Lena Dunham, the show’s creator and the star. FYI, they’re shooting a half a block away from Carrie’s Sex and the City apartment. Update: The actress on the left is Rita Wilson. That’s been bugging me. I can rest now.

The actress on the right is Allison Williams, daughter of news anchor Brian Williams. Thanks to Jon Stewart, whenever I think of Brian Williams I will always think and see “the giant head of Brian Williams”.

Here is a wonderful article about a man who is able to hear music for the first time. The song to reach his ears before any other was, apparently, the Lacrimosa from Mozart’s Requiem. Mozart died when he was nine bars into the Lacrimosa section of the Requiem, and it was completed by his friend Franz Xaver Süssmayr. Those nine bars were crucial and informative however, and Süssmayr’s completion feels pretty seamless (to me).

Given the text, the Lacrimosa sections of Requiems frequently bring out the most tender work a composer can muster. It’s a call for mercy on judgement day. The latin translates to:

Full of tears shall be that day
On which from ashes shall arise
The guilty man to be judged;
Therefore, O God, have mercy on him.
Gentle Lord Jesus,
grant them eternal rest. Amen.

Here is what Austin Chapman, the young man in the article, has to say about hearing it (and music) for the first time:

“When Mozart’s Lacrimosa came on, I was blown away by the beauty of it. At one point of the song, it sounded like angels singing and I suddenly realized that this was the first time I was able to appreciate music. Tears rolled down my face and I tried to hide it. But when I looked over I saw that there wasn’t a dry eye in the car.”

The picture below is of the beginning of the Highline (abandoned elevated railroad tracks that were turned into a public park). I went out to read, because I needed to get out of the house, and I needed to do something other than drown in my missing-Buddy-sorrow.

I started what is turning out to be a perfect, magical book. It’s called Jim the Boy and it’s the coming of age story of a ten year old boy in North Carolina during the depression. Seriously, it’s a treasure. Lucky me to have Howard hand this book to me at this particular point in time. It is soothing my heart. I’m going back to curl up on the couch and finish it now.